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Main Section Arcticle
December 7, 2008 |
How bad is the economy going to get? |
Last week saw jobs slashed, interest rates cut, house prices plunge and a fixture of Britain’s high streets go to the wall. When is all the bad news going to stop? |
By David Smith and Richard Woods |
JOBS |
According to the information company Mandis, which monitors announcements by about 100,000 organisations of all sizes, there was a sharp acceleration in the pace of job losses last month. It calculates that firms cut numbers by 122,748 in November, up from 75,575 in October and 46,250 in September. Firms are also creating jobs, but at a declining rate, down from 45,389 in September to 31,589 last month. How bad will it get? There are 1.82m people, or 5.8% of the working age population, unemployed on the government’s preferred measure, based on the Labour Force Survey. Most economists expect this total to rise to nearly 3m, with the gloomiest suggesting an increase to 3.5m. This would be its highest level on record, beating the peak in 1984, when 11.9% were unemployed. The claimant count, currently 980,900, is also expected to rise sharply, to between 1.5m and 2m. The highest figure under Margaret Thatcher was 3.4m. |
>> Original Article << |
Business Section Article
December 7, 2008 |
High street pain deepens as sales keep falling
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By David Smith |
Tim Denison of Synovate Retail Performance said non-food shopping trips last month were down 6.6% on a year earlier. Meanwhile, figures monitored by Mandis Information Services from a database of 100,000 firms show a net loss of 91,159 jobs during November, more than double the number in October |
A new forecast from Standard Chartered bank predicts the economy will shrink by 2.3% next year. Analysts believe that even after last week’s one percentage-point cut in Bank rate to 2% further reductions are on the way. |
>> Original Article << |
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